The night was fearfully hot; scarcely a breath of dir stirred as their ambulance creaked put toward the river.

The Long Bridge, flanked by its gate houses, loomed up in the dusk; and: 

“Halt!  Who goes there?”

“Friends with the countersign.”

“Dismount one and advance with the countersign!”

And the Sergeant of cavalry dismounted and moved forward; there was a low murmur; then:  “Pass on, Sanitary!”

A few large and very yellow stars looked down from the blackness above; under the wheels the rotten planking and worn girders of the Long Bridge groaned and complained and sagged.

Ailsa, looking out from under the skeleton hood, behind her, saw other waggons following, loaded heavily with hospital supplies and baggage, escorted by the cavalrymen, who rode as though exhausted, yellow trimmed shell jackets unbuttoned exposing sweat-soaked undershirts, caps pushed back on their perspiring heads.

Letty, lying on a mattress, had fallen asleep.  Ailsa, scarcely able to breathe in the heavy heat, leaned panting against the framework, watching the darkness.

It seemed to be a little cooler on the Virginia side after they had passed the General Hospital, and had gone forward through the deserted city of Alexandria.  About a mile beyond a slight freshness, scarcely a breeze, stirred Ailsa’s hair.  The driver said to her, pointing at a shadowy bulk with his whip-stock: 

“That’s the Marshall House, where Colonel Ellsworth was killed.  God help their ‘Tigers’ if the Fire Zouaves ever git at ’em.”

She looked at the unlighted building in silence.  Farther on the white tents of a Pennsylvania regiment loomed gray under the stars; beyond them the sentinels were zouaves of an Indiana regiment, wearing scarlet fezzes.

Along the road, which for a while paralleled the Orange and Alexandria Railroad, cavalry vedettes sat their horses, carbine on thigh.  No trains passed the embankment; once she saw, on a weed-grown siding, half a dozen locomotives apparently intact; but no fire burned in their furnaces, no smoke curled from their huge drumhead stacks; and on the bell frame of one an owl was sitting.

And now, between a double line of ditches, where a battalion of engineers lay asleep in their blankets, the road entered the pine woods.

Ailsa slept fitfully, but the far challenge and the halting of the waggon usually awoke her in darkness feebly lit by the rays of a candle-set lantern, swung up inquiringly by the corporal of some guard.  And, “Pass forward, Sanitary!” was the invariable formula; and the ambulance rolled on again between a double abattis of fallen trees, flanked on either horizon by tall, quiet pines.

Once she heard singing; a small company of cavalry-men straggled by, and, seeing their long lances and their Belgian forage caps, she leaned out and asked what regiment it might be.  Somebody answered:  “Escort Squad of Rankin’s Lancers, 1st United States.  Our regiment is in Detroit, Miss, and thank God we’re going back there.”